who made the first gun

No single person can be credited with “making the first gun.”

Quick Scoop: Who Made the First Gun?

• The earliest true guns were simple “hand cannons” developed in China in the late 1200s, during the Song–Yuan period, soon after the invention and military use of gunpowder.

• These early guns evolved out of fire lances (bamboo or metal tubes that shot flames and pellets) and were created by anonymous Chinese artisans and military engineers, not by one named inventor.

• Because they appeared inside a large imperial war machine over centuries, historical records do not preserve a single “first gun maker” the way we know later inventors like Samuel Colt or Richard Gatling.

So what do historians say?

Most modern historians agree on this timeline:

1. Gunpowder is developed in China by alchemists by around the 9th century.

2. By the 10th–12th centuries, Chinese armies use gunpowder in bombs and “fire lances.”

3. Around 1280, metal hand cannons appear in China, considered the first real guns.

4. These ideas spread west (via the Mongol Empire and trade routes), and by the mid‑1300s, European armies are using primitive guns and bombards.

Because of this, if someone asks “who made the first gun,” the most accurate answer is:

It was invented in medieval China by unknown craftsmen and engineers who turned gunpowder weapons into the first metal hand cannons, rather than by one named individual.

Later famous gun inventors (for context)

They did not make the first gun, but they shaped later firearms:

• James Puckle – early repeating “Puckle gun” (patent 1718).

• Samuel Colt – successful revolvers in the 1830s.

• Richard Gatling – Gatling gun (early rapid‑fire weapon) in the 1860s.

These names are well documented, unlike the unknown innovators who created the very first guns in China.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.